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Report on FAO/SARPN Workshop on HIV/AIDS and Land
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The terms of reference for the country studies called for qualitative and exploratory studies using a participatory approach. Researchers were required to:
- Do interviews in at least 20 households in at least two villages in each of three countries, namely Kenya, Lesotho and South Africa
- Focus on the most food insecure and vulnerable, particularly widows and orphans
- Interview government agencies, NGOs and other organisations working on HIV/AIDS and land issues and
- Interview representatives of community institutions and organisations.
Specific issues to investigate included:
- Changes in land tenure systems due to HIV/AIDS
- Survival strategies of affected households
- Impacts on security of access and rights to land
- Impacts on agricultural productivity and food security
- Implications for land tenure and administration systems
- Future areas for research and concrete policy recommendations.
Lesotho
Studies were conducted in two villages, Matsatsaneng and Ha Poli. Matsatsaneng is in the lowland area with relatively larger agricultural lands and is closer to urban areas. Ha Poli is in the more isolated highland area with less agricultural land. People here have lost land to the Lesotho Highlands Water Project.
Due to the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS, researchers referred to prolonged illness, only referring to HIV/AIDS if respondents introduced the term.
Points raised in the discussion of this study included the need for more information on:
- Rural-urban links and on the impact of HIV/AIDS on peri-urban areas.
- Dates, places visited and how the study was conducted to give the study greater credence and to provide for possible follow up studies
- Household profiles, land, production, sources of livelihood, sharecropping arrangements, and agro-economic data.
Legal and administrative framework
The description of the policy, legal and administrative framework needs strengthening. The role of land administrators is unclear and there is some confusion between existing legislation and regulations and proposed changes that are not yet in effect: for example the proposals on people forfeiting land left fallow for more than two years. This is particularly important because of the gap that exists in Lesotho between law and practice. This gap is partly due to opposition to the new laws from traditional leaders who see their prerogatives being usurped. As a result concern for the welfare of households affected by HIV/AIDS may not be the only reason why chiefs and headmen allow them to retain access to land left fallow for extended periods. An assessment of the land policy review process and the new White Paper on land policy would be useful.
Use of health workers
The use of health workers to identify informants may have distorted the responses. The researchers pointed out that health workers were only used to identify households and were not involved in the interviews. The fact that non-affected households were not included in the study made it difficult to distinguish what was due specifically to HIV/AIDS from what was associated with poverty in general. This was a feature of all the studies. Providing this information would require a more extensive study and more sophisticated methodology.
Recommendations
The study appears to have yielded a limited number of land related recommendations. The researchers need to clarify whether the findings point to other recommendations related to land rights, tenure and use.
Kenya
The areas studied were Bondo in Nyanza district, and Nyeri in Central Province. They were selected for high HIV/AIDS prevalence, problems over land issues, and the presence of initiatives to address HIV/AIDS and issues such as land and gender. Finally, they represented different ethnic groups.
Interviews were approached with an awareness of the sensitivity of the issue and the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS infection.
In general the analysis needed to focus more on the qualitative information and not spend so much time on trying to quantify the results, given that this was essentially a qualitative study with a limited sample. The discussion noted that none of the studies quantified the impact of HIV/AIDS on household food security.The stigma attached to HIV/AIDS has undermined the ability of women to organise around the issue.
Connecting HIV/AIDS and land
The researchers noted that they experienced problems in getting people to reflect on the connections between HIV/AIDS and land issues as awareness that these issues are linked is only beginning to emerge amongst those affected.
Land disputes
More information on land disputes is needed – legal aid NGOs should be able to help with getting this information.
Research fatigue
The issue of research fatigue exhibited by respondents in Bondo came up. This underlines the need to link up with other organisations so that people are not repeatedly asked for the same information by different researchers. A related issue is the need to build a feedback process into the research design so that the research becomes action oriented. Possibilities here include linking respondents to legal aid to assist with land tenure and rights issues and taking the findings back to informants, their communities and district officials. This may also encourage them to seek an active role in the policy development process.
HIV/AIDS in nomadic communities
For Kenya there is a specific need to look at the issue of care for HIV/AIDS infected people and affected households in pastoral communities that are on the move. This may also apply to other Southern and Eastern African countries with similar nomadic populations.
Malawi
Field research was done in three villages, Namatingwa in the southern Mulanje District, Kapida in the central Dowa District and Yaphama in the northern Rumphi District.
Lack of a control group
The issue of a control group to help identify issues specific to HIV/AIDS affected households was raised. The discussant pointed out that in the context of general economic decline this made it difficult to distinguish the effects of HIV/AIDS from those of generalised impoverishment. A related issue was that the studies did not distinguish clearly between households experiencing different stages of the impact of HIV/AIDS. This made it difficult to identify specific interventions appropriate to households at different stages ranging from initial infection, through incapacitation and the death of household members to the consequences for survivors. The discussion noted that this level of analysis would require more sophisticated and in depth studies.
Effectiveness of land based livelihood options
The discussion noted that as the disease progressed household livelihood options tended to become more limited and land use became more prominent in people’s livelihood strategies. However, despite this reality it is not clear that land use is the most effective option for HIV/AIDS affected households. Future studies need to investigate this, looking both at ways in which affected households can use the land more effectively and at other possible livelihood options and ways in which these households might be able to use them.
South Africa
Four study sites were selected on the basis of geographical spread and prior familiarity to the research team.
Muden is the site of one of the earliest land redistribution projects in KwaZulu-Natal. Residents have freehold tenure through a communal property association but in practice the settlement has been absorbed into the adjacent tribal authority under communal tenure.
Dondotha is a conservative tribal area with good links to nearby industrial areas and a relatively high number of comparatively wealthy households. The five interviews in this area were conducted after the others and targeted AIDS orphans when it became evident that orphan households were not well represented in the other interviews.
KwaDumisa is a rural peri-urban area with most residents employed on surrounding commercial farms. The area is relatively sparsely populated but experiences steady in-migration.
KwaNyuswa is densely populated and partly urbanised.
Households to be interviewed were identified as being affected by a chronic illness (not specifically HIV/AIDS for ethical reasons) in the past or present. This differed in Dondotha where key informants were asked specifically to identify households where parents had died following chronic illness. Informants interpreted this to include households that had lost parents but were headed by ‘orphans’ in their twenties. This does not comply with the UN definition of an AIDS orphan as someone below the age of 15 who has lost both parents due to AIDS. As in the other studies the main technique employed was semi-structured interviews. Limitations noted in connection with this methodology include:
- Absence of a control group means that while the study provides clear evidence of the problems confronting HIV/AIDS affected households it is not clear to what extent other households face similar problems.
- Absence of interviews with antagonists in the case of disputes over land or other issues
- Possible bias in the selection of households for interview by key informants
- Lack of interviews with other role players, most significantly in this case traditional authorities who often intervene to protect the land rights of affected households.
Discussion pointed to the need to broaden the studies beyond the household level to look at other role players in more depth and the need for more information on what happens to farm workers when they get HIV/AIDS?
Uganda
This study was based on a personal narrative collected from a Ugandan woman who openly acknowledged her HIV/AIDS infection. The narrative was analysed using the central concept of recurring crises precipitated by the infection. The crises began with the infection and death of the husband and proceeded through the women’s struggle to retain access to her land, inability to pay for her children’s schooling and her concern about how to secure her children’s future after her death. Each crisis was analysed in terms of its consequences for the household, institutional responses, impacts on access to land and land use and the policy issues that it raised. For more details see the section below on policy issues.
Methodological issues
Achieving policy impact
Participants discussed how compelling qualitative studies of this nature would be for policy makers and what could be done to make these and future studies more compelling. There was general support for more extensive quantitative studies as well as in depth local studies with controls to distinguish between impacts attributable to HIV/AIDS and those due to other causes. There was also a strong feeling that government and other stakeholders needed to be drawn into the process as this would lead to a greater sense of ownership and increased policy influence. One option might be conducting a stakeholder analysis and using the current studies to draw policy makers into the process of broadening and deepening the enquiry. Such an analysis would help to address the need for coordination across a range of sectors to achieve effective policy impact.
Involving community structures and local government could also play a role by drawing them into the policy development process and into subsequent action to implement policy. This might also help to ensure that policies address local variables, which may be difficult to cater for at national level. Without this kind of involvement studies will need a clear strategy on how to achieve policy impact in different situations and countries.
Controls
Failure to differentiate between the impacts of HIV/AIDS and other causes such as poverty and gender was common to all the studies given their limited and exploratory nature.
Questions to consider include:
- What is specific to HIV/AIDS affected households and what is a reflection of poverty due to economic decline, poor governance, and decreased social expenditure as a result of structural adjustment programmes or other causes?
- Is HIV/AIDS only compounding issues that already exist or does it reach a point where it actually starts to change the nature of issues or introduce new issues?
- How much is due to HIV/AIDS and how much due to poverty and wider economic processes, gender and land issues?
Establishing this would require studies of unaffected households, households that are affected to different degrees, comparisons of households in different situations and areas, as well as studies that look at affected households before, during and after infection. On land conflicts studies need to include information from antagonists and third parties such as local government or traditional leaders.
Despite their limitations, the current studies show clearly that some issues are new, for example the level of orphan households.
Case histories
In depth case histories can bring out the differences between households and situations. For this to be effective the respondents have to be willing to talk openly about their HIV/AIDS status and their experiences.
Researchers need to establish a framework for analysing the case history and placing it in a context. This could include interviews with people with a direct or indirect interest in the land and with representatives of relevant institutional structures, including support structures identified by the respondent. This could be supported by research into the nature of land tenure, the agricultural economy of the area and cropping regimes.
Designing future studies
Some felt that this study had too many variables to really influence policy development. Future studies would require greater focus for local implementation and clearer identification of policy implications. Macro studies are also needed that link to future-orientated demographic modelling. Future studies should address geographical, cultural and economic diversity. To ensure policy impact involving government and other stakeholders who can influence policy development is important. Teams need a mix of skills including involvement in, or knowledge of, HIV/AIDS and land issues in addition to research skills.
Researchers need to take a range of issues into account in designing studies including:
- Coding information to facilitate larger scale studies and to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative studies
- Ensuring that the sample size is appropriate for the scale / unit of analysis (village, district, state)
- Identifying the range of information sources available in different locations
- Choosing information sources appropriate for the objectives of the study
- The influence that access and entry points may have on the study
- Ways of remunerating or adding value for informants. Possibilities include combining research with counselling and support by linking with service organisations in the area
- The different views and priorities of household members relating to variables such as age and gender that affect their position in the household and community.
- Sensitivities around HIV/AIDS relating to the use of words, confidentiality and a variety of ethical issues.
There is a general need for more specific and in depth information on how HIV/AIDS is affecting
- Security of tenure
- Capacity to use land
- Ability to access land (for the landless).
Finances will limit the scope of what can be done. The aim should be for ‘good enough’ research. This needs to be defined in terms of what will be effective in influencing policy in specific countries or localities.
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